Power Through Prayer

Little praying is a kind of make-believe, a salvo for the conscience, a farce and a delusion.

The city of our God becomes the city of the dead; the Church a graveyard, not an embattled army. Praise and prayer are stifled; worship is dead. The preacher and the preaching have helped sin, not holiness; peopled hell,…

Nothing is so dead as a dead orthodoxy, too dead to speculate, too dead to think, to study, or to pray.

As the engine never moves until the fire is kindled, so preaching, with all its machinery, perfection, and polish, is at a dead standstill, as far as spiritual results are concerned, till prayer has kindled and created t…

Prayer freshens the heart of the preacher, keeps it in tune with God and in sympathy with the people, lifts his ministry out of the chilly air of a profession, fructifies routine and moves every wheel with the facility a…

Dead men give out dead sermons, and dead sermons kill.

No learning can make up for the failure to pray. No earnestness, no diligence, no study, no gifts will supply its lack.

It takes twenty years to make a sermon, because it takes twenty years to make the man.

The preachers who are the mightiest in their closets with God are the mightiest in their pulpits with men.

God’s acquaintance is not made by pop calls.

Much time spent with God is the secret of all successful praying.

Prayer makes the man; prayer makes the preacher; prayer makes the pastor.

God can work wonders if He can get a suitable man. Men can work wonders if they can get God to lead them.

Never did the cause of God need perfect illustrations of the possibilities of prayer more than in this age.

To pray is the greatest thing we can do: and to do it well there must be calmness, time, and deliberation; otherwise it is degraded into the smallest and meanest of things.

Preachers are not sermon makers, but men makers and saint makers, and he only is well-trained for this business who has made himself a man and a saint.

Prayer is the preacher's mightiest weapon. An almighty force in itself, it gives life and force to all.

The preaching is but a voice. The voice in silence dies, the text is forgotten, the sermon fades from memory; the preacher lives.

The man makes the preacher. God must make the man. The messenger is, if possible, more than the message. The preacher is more than the sermon.

The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men — men of prayer.

A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear and your heart full of God's Spirit is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin.

Invested with such gracious prerogatives, exposed to so great evils, involving so many grave responsibilities, it would be a parody on the shrewdness of the devil and a libel on his character and reputation if he did not…

The preacher's sharpest and strongest preaching should be to himself. His most difficult, delicate, laborious, and thorough work must be with himself.

It is impossible for the preacher to keep his spirit in harmony with the divine nature of his high calling without much prayer. That the preacher by dint of duty and laborious fidelity to the work and routine of the mini…

Your sermons last but an hour or two; your life preaches all the week.

The preaching man is to be the praying man. Prayer is the preacher's mightiest weapon.

The life-giving preacher is a man of God, whose heart is ever athirst for God, whose soul is ever following hard after God, whose eye is single to God, and in whom by the power of God's Spirit the flesh and the world hav…

Prayer is humbling work. It abases intellect and pride, crucifies vainglory, and signs our spiritual bankruptcy, and all these are hard for flesh and blood to bear. It is easier not to pray than to bear them.

No man gets God who does not follow hard after him, and no soul follows hard after God who is not after him in early morn.

Crucified preaching can come only from a crucified man.

The true sermon is a thing of life. The sermon grows because the man grows. The sermon is forceful because the man is forceful. The sermon is holy because the man is holy. The sermon is full of the divine unction because…

The character of our praying will determine the character of our preaching. Light praying will make light preaching.

A desire for God which cannot break the chains of sleep is a weak thing and will do but little good for God after it has indulged itself fully. The desire for God that keeps so far behind the devil and the world at the b…

If some Christians that have been complaining of their ministers had said and acted less before men and had applied themselves with all their might to cry to God for their ministers—had, as it were, risen and stormed hea…

Public prayers are of little worth unless they are founded on or followed up by private praying.

The preacher must be surrendered to God in the holiest devotion. He is not a professional man, his ministry is not a profession; it is a divine institution, a divine devotion.

The preacher's sharpest and strongest preaching should be to himself.

The real sermon is made in the closet.

WE are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency to…

The preaching that kills is non-spiritual preaching. The ability of the preaching is not from God. Lower sources than God have given to it energy and stimulus. The Spirit is not evident in the preacher nor his preaching.

Truth unquickened by God's Spirit deadens as much as, or more than, error.

May a physician in plague-time take any more relaxation or recreation than is necessary for his life, when so many are expecting his help in a case of life and death?

What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use—men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through…

Misemployment of time is injurious to the mind.

Recreation to a minister must be as whetting is with the mower--that is, to be used only so far as is necessary for his work.

Every preacher who does not make prayer a mighty factor in his own life and ministry is weak as a factor in God's work and is powerless to project God's cause in this world.

Unction in the preacher puts God in the gospel.

Life-giving preaching costs the preacher much -- death to self, crucifixion to the world, the travail of his own soul. Crucified preaching only can give life. Crucified preaching can come only from a crucified man.

God wants elect men--men out of whom self and the world have gone by a severe crucifixion, by a bankruptcy which has so totally ruined self and the world that there is neither hope nor desire of recovery; men who by this…

A school to teach preachers how to pray, as God counts praying, would be more beneficial to true piety, true worship, and true preaching than all theological schools.